10 (well, 9) ways to ensure your next grant application fails

Got this in an email from the Bioinformatics Core at the Genome Center. I saw a lot of these mistakes in an NSF Biodiversity panel that I served on earlier this year. One thing I disagree with is the notion that you cannot do bioinformatics on a personal computer. I do this all the time. Nevertheless, this is a great resource for the UC Davis crowd.

The NIH RO1 deadline (among others) is fast approaching and in the month of September, grant planning in collaboration with the UCD Bioinformatics Core is 100% free*. Our typical grant preparation packet includes:

* A face-to-face meeting with the Ph.D. scientists of the Bioinformatics Core
* A letter of support from Dr. Ian Korf, Associate Director for Bioinformatics at the Genome Center, expressing our delight and enthusiasm for your awesome project
* A bioinformatics methods section written by experienced Bioinformatics Core analysts
* Figures to help your reviewers understand the importance of your study
* Cost estimates for anything from pilot studies to long-term projects
* Thorough inspection of experimental design by a professional statistician

Granting agencies are increasingly looking for proof of bioinformatics competency in awarding funds. Applications that don’t demonstrate bioinformatics capabilities within the labs of collaborators, or through other research facilities, will not score well. This includes the running of standard and innovative bioinformatics analysis pipelines as well as design, purchase, and maintenance of the requisite high performance computing hardware. The Bioinformatics Core at the UC Davis Genome Center has 10 years of experience analyzing large biological datasets, from microarrays through Illumina and PacBio sequences, in close coordination with the Genome Center’s other experimental core facilities. We have 6 years of experience teaching bioinformatics analysis to grad students, postdocs, and PIs. And we have 10 years of experience designing and running high performance computing resources, including ROCKS clusters and high-memory servers.

While I also have done bioinformatics on a desktop computer or laptop (normally >8GB RAM), I would NOT recommend leaning heavily on this in your grant application. Normally personal computers are OK for data parsing (converting/filtering files), low memory tasks (e.g. closed-reference OTU picking), or data visualization (R code); during the course of most funded projects you will need to utilize a high-memory server or run jobs in parallel on a server. In a grant, I would say that it is fine to mention lab/office computing facilities will be utilized for small tasks, but proposals need to have a significant provision for bioinformatics resources (either cloud-based or in collaboration with a core facility or high-performance computing group). Otherwise the assumption is that you won’t be doing cutting edge science.

Like Jenna, I have also seen MANY of these mistakes in grant proposals I’ve reviewed for various NSF panels during the past two years – particularly #6 (outdated technology – because 454 is now considered completely obsolete!).

Search microBEnet

Search for:

Support microBEnet

The microBEnet website is a hub for information about the microbiology of the built environment. We strive to be as up-to-date as possible on new papers, developing technologies, upcoming events, etc. Originally and currently funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, ongoing donations help support the website and the addition of new content.